Geocaching in Shropshire and beyond…

Our 6000th find: Jungle Book and Wallace & Gromit series

We’d done a few caches during the week with the aim of making our 6000th find achievable this weekend. Only 22 caches to find to get the milestone today, so we picked what looked like a nice area and a set of caches that were getting good logs.

We don’t usually go this far up the M6 caching, but we made an exception for these. Isaac was navigating using Memory Map and took me a way I was not expecting to the cache parking area: approaching from the west rather that the east.

We got kitted up and set off on our walk, with the aim of doing the Jungle Book series first. After about 0.3 of the 0.4 walk to the first cache, I glanced at my GPSr to see the distance to go going up rather than down. Hmmmm…

I then took a look at Memory Map and realised our mistake. Not a problem though as we’ll just do the Wallace & Gromit series now and do the Jungle Book ones after lunch.

The walk was absolutely fabulous as most of it was alongside the River Brock and there was wild garlic everywhere. None of the caches were too taxing, but they were all nicely hidden and with a good mix of containers and hides.

All too soon we were at the bonus cache on the Wallace & Gromit series, which we found after a short search. We picked some wild garlic to take home as Isaac wanted to use some in the Sunday dinner he was planning to cook Mrs Bolas Heathens tomorrow on Mothers Day.

After some soup and sandwiches at the picnic area by the car park, we set off to do the Jungle Book series. This was a similar format to the earlier series, but in the opposite direction along the River Brock.

Lots of nice hides and locations with easy finds were the order of the day. Part way round, we veered off to the other side of the river to pick up a very sneakily hidden Traditional cache that was not part of the Jungle Book series.

With all the details we needed gathered, we headed off to find the bonus cache. Without giving too much away, we’d actually almost walked past it doing the Wallace & Gromit series earlier so knew where we needed to be. It was a steep and slippery climb up to the cache but well worth it as it was a nice hide and more importantly, it was our 6000th find :-).

With both series complete, we had time to go and find some more local caches. Isaac suggested picking off as many drive-by’s as we could in the time, which sounded like an excellent plan.

He navigated us down lanes I’ve never been down before and to places I’d never even heard of, but we managed to bag lots more caches. Highlights of these included:

A visit to the remains of a Roman baths in the Roman town of Ribchester.

Seeing the Lightening and Camberra gate guardians at BAE Salmesbury.

Having to cross a very smelly field that had just had muck spread all over it.

A nice hide in a well crafted log, with an end that moved to one side.

We’d planned the Preston Geo-Post Office cache as the last one of the day as it was right by the M6 and a handy way of getting to home quickly.

A fantastic day out in beautiful countryside. 35 finds for the day and our 6000th find completed too.